A study on nuclei in the SEC - report from the Public Speaking Project in Lund

Bryan Mosey

doi:10.7146/hjlcb.v7i13.25078

Abstract

As part of the Public Speaking Project in Lund, the Spoken English Corpus has been processed in a number of ways and put into a database format thus allowing the retrieval of accurate statistical data. Based on a simple definition of nucleus provided by Gerry Knowles, the nuclei in the prosodic transcriptions of the material have been located and marked. A field indicating the position of each word within the tone unit (1 representing the last word of the tone unit and 2, the penultimate word etc.) has also been added thus facilitating the statistical study of nucleus position. Also studied are the tone types occurring in the nuclei in the material. Here, the findings provide empirical support for the postulation of a dichotomy of tone types. The functions of the various nucleus types in the text categories making up the material are discussed on the basis of empirical evidence from the material.

Highlights

As part of the Public Speaking Project in Lund, the Spoken English Corpus has been processed in a number of ways and put into a database format allowing the retrieval of accurate statistical data
In order to be able to join these in one large database, it was first necessary to carry out a little editing. This was due in part to the fact that two analysts are responsible for the prosodic transcriptions of the material
Olof Ekedahl wrote a dBASE program which selected the nucleus from each tone unit in the material and updated the database used in this study

Summary

Introduction

As part of the Public Speaking Project in Lund, the Spoken English Corpus has been processed in a number of ways and put into a database format allowing the retrieval of accurate statistical data. Olof Ekedahl wrote a dBASE program which selected the nucleus from each tone unit in the material and updated the database used in this study. Nucleus position With regard to the definition of nucleus given above and the format of the database used in this study, the most straightforward way of quantifying nucleus position is in terms of the number of words from the end of the tone unit.

Results

Conclusion